Brain Injuries

SACRAMENTO -- An effort by the National Football League and owners of other professional sports teams to limit workers' compensation claims by out-of-state athletes is close to final passage in the California Legislature. The measure cleared the state Senate on Friday on a 34-2 vote. In May, it passed the Assembly on a 61-4 tally. The 10 most dangerous jobs The proposal is expected to win final passage next week in the Assembly and to be on the governor's desk shortly after the scheduled Sept.

The National Football League's controversial injury legacy conjures images of powerfully built linebackers and fleet-footed running backs hobbled by years of brutal contact at the line of scrimmage. Few pause to consider the humbler kicker. Yet over the last six years, 64 former kickers and punters have filed claims for serious head or brain injuries against their former teams, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of California workers' compensation data. The full article is found here . Among the filers is NFL Hall of Fame placekicker Jan Stenerud, who starred for the Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings, as well as all-pro performers like Morten Andersen and Norm Johnson.

By the thousands, professional athletes from around the country are seeking medical care or money through California's workers' compensation system for brain trauma and other injuries suffered on the playing field. Former athletes have filed more than 4,400 claims involving head and brain injuries since 2006 - seven times more than in the previous 15 years, according to a Times analysis of state records. Nearly three-quarters of all new claims made in California now include alleged brain injuries.

Months after Chuck Spires came home from Iraq, he began having dizzy spells and radical mood swings and had lost all interest in sex. Army doctors diagnosed him with multiple brain injuries - he had endured several head-rattling bomb blasts - along with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it was another symptom, the sudden gain of 50 pounds, that led to deeper investigation. Tests revealed damage to Spires' pituitary gland. It was a rare finding in the military, but that may be because few doctors have been looking for it. Emerging evidence suggests that pituitary problems may be going undiagnosed in victims of blast-related brain injuries, the defining wounds of the recent wars.

Why is hockey such a violent and dangerous sport? Medical researchers from Canada have an answer: Blame the media. “Media reports of an issue such as TBI in sport can contribute to an altered culture,” they write in a study published online Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. TBI stands for traumatic brain injury , and it's become a major public health concern in recent years. It happens when sudden trauma causes the head to hit an object and damages the brain. A concussion is an example of TBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains.

Ronny Keller, a defenseman for Olten of the Swiss B league, has been left paralyzed after getting hit into the boards during a playoff game, doctors reported Thursday. Keller, 33, was chasing a puck into a corner when Langenthal forward Stefan Schnyder came up from behind and drove Keller into the boards with a hard hit in overtime of the game Tuesday. Keller crashed head-first into the wall and remained on the ice motionless for several minutes as medical personnel attended to him. Doctors at the hospital where Keller was taken released a statement Thursday with the grim prognosis.

As more older Americans take up motorcycling -- or return to it after a decades-long hiatus -- one thing is becoming clearer to emergency room physicians: When graying riders go down, they go down hard. A Brown University study published Wednesday in the journal Injury Prevention, found that bikers age 60 and over were 2 1/2 times more likely to wind up in an emergency room with severe injuries than were riders in their 20s and 30s. Middle-aged riders fared somewhat better, but were still 66% more likely to sustain serious injury than were younger bikers.

Advanced tests conducted by the National Institutes of Health on the brain of football star Junior Seau, who committed suicide in May, showed he had signs of a degenerative brain disease, the Associated Press reported. The examination of Seau's brain showed "abnormalities consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)," the kind of injury associated with repetitive head injuries, the AP said. An initial autopsy on Seau performed by the San Diego County medical examiner found no apparent damage to his brain from years of football.

Junior Seau, among the greatest linebackers in NFL history, suffered from degenerative brain disease when he fatally shot himself in May, the National Institutes of Health said in a study released Thursday, another blow to a league whose former players say they were never warned about the dangers of head injuries. More than 2,000 former players are suing the NFL, contending the league never properly addressed the problems with head injuries and in many cases withheld information about the long-term effects associated with them.

Changing the rules -- more than educational or other strategies -- has the best chance of making kids' hockey a safer sport, researchers said. "Rule changes essentially alter the culture of a sport and clearly define acceptable behavior for” players, parents, coaches and officials, the researchers wrote in an article published Monday in the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal. The article cited a study showing that the 2009-10 season saw an incidence of game-related concussions that was seven times higher than that in 1998-99.